Friday: Nick came over. I greeted him at the door in lots of form-fitting clothing and an inflatable ball-hood. You can pretty much imagine what happened next. We went out to dinner afterwards.

Saturday: I was awakened by a knock at the door – UPS was delivering my new Mac earlier than expected! Transferring my data to it was more hassle than I expected it to be; it didn’t want to pull it off of my backup drive for some reason, and going from the old computer via wi-fi was taking insane amounts of time. Like estimates of five days. I hustled off to the local Apple Store while Nick stayed in bed, and came home with a couple of adaptors that would let me move my data over Ethernet.

We went to pick up the Zipcar we’d arranged for, then drove down to Columbia City for the closing sale of Tasty Tiger, a spandex-oriented clothing store run by some acquaintances. I spent… maybe a bit more than I should have. But now I have some cool stretchy clothes, many of which can even be worn in normal life. In our hustle to get out before the zipcar rental expired, I accidentally left my wallet behind. I only discovered this after the car was dropped off and Nick was on the bus back to his home, of course; I called them, and it should be getting to me soon. Hopefully before the few bits of food I have in the apartment all get eaten.

The lack of a wallet meant I blew off a party I was thinking of going to, so I mostly just poked at the data transfer. Finally, near bedtime, I tried doing the Ethernet transfer again, after first making sure that both machines had their wi-fi off; I was much cheered when I saw it giving me estimates around 4 hours instead of 150.

When I woke up, almost everything was transferred. It didn’t properly transfer my directory full of graphics apps, annoyingly, so I had to manually drag those over. And Indesign seems to have been mortally wounded, so I’ll have to reinstall it. Everything else seems cool, though – all my documents are there, everything runs as expected. In a few days I’ll flush the old machine and pass it on.

I was hoping to spend more time chilling and getting ahead on Rita, but really I had a pretty damn good weekend and I’m fine with that.

Well that was unexpected. The casual mid-week barbecue I went to this evening suddenly turned into a wedding midway through. A very casual, low-key wedding; I wasn't dressed up and I think I was still more dressed up than the bride and groom. I blame burlesque.

It was pretty cool to watch Ursula and Kevin exchange vows and rings. Or, rather, vows and a ring and a pendant made of walrus penis because Ursula just isn't a ring-wearer at all. Here's to many happy years for them.

I was the only single woman at the wedding, as it happened, so Ursula threw the “bouquet” (one lily) in my direction. I dropped it. I am just never getting married, am I. Ah well, as long as I have a decent string of boyfriends and/or exes-with-benefits, I'll be happy. Especially if they keep on being willing to critique my writing in progress.

And now it is sleepytime.

I’d spent the morning doing a color comp for Myriad Song that involved some working out of heavy effects. I was tired and a little drained after pushing on that for a couple hours. Nick had cancelled his usual Tuesday visit; I ended up just lying around feeling sluggish for a while. I was thinking of just calling it a day and going to bed, but I knew I pretty much had to get the rough done for the next page of Rita if I was to have any hope of getting it uploaded before the end of tomorrow. I just couldn’t drag myself out of the beanbag to draw, though.

Then I said “fuck it”, got up, and went to the regular cartoonist meetup at a nearby bar. One hour of drinking, talking, and drawing later, I had my rough. So I get to go to bed feeling absolutely guiltless. Yay!

I would really love it if I could get more than three hours of solid work out of myself on an average day, though. Fff.

i want to play this
i want to play this
i want to play this

i want to play this

Stuff I did so far this week instead of getting two pages of Rita up:

– Took my Mac down to the Apple Store to maybe get a new battery. They were all “yeah it really isn’t replacement time, let’s try cleaning some crap up, also reinstall the OS, no really, it’ll help, come back in a week if it’s still not doing better.” And surprisingly enough reinstalling the OS was super painless (no data loss or anything, it only touched the system stuff) and may have actually helped. May have also helped that I finally dug into and fixed a weird Keychain issue that happens to some serial upgraders.
– Hung out with Nick for the first time in a couple of weeks, due to sick and whatnot. It was pretty low-key and still a lot of fun – mostly we went out to supper and watched the Venture Brothers season premiere.
– Seriously pondered doing Dr. Mrs. The Monarch cosplay someday. I figure it’s a good thing to wear on the last day of a con, when my voice is shot anyway…
– Went down to White Plains with Nick, hung out drinking iced tea for a bit while he visited the marijuana farmer’s market (he currently has a card, I don’t).
– Started fiddling with my diet. Attempting to understand VEGETABLES after many many years of being befuddled by them. And eat less sluggishness-inducing wheat.
– Almost completely finished SECRET PROJECT. Finally. There’s a couple tweaks but it’s basically done.
– Did some stuff related to finding quotes for book 2, and some thinking about the Kickstarter.

I’m about halfway finished with the next page of Rita, which is a complicated thing with eight panels and three realities on it. Hopefully I’ll get it done and up tomorrow. Then it’s on to the next page, and the next, and the next. Comics are a long slog. But I like doing them.

Bedtime, I guess!

Holy crap. It is amazing what minimalist running shoes and proper form for those (landing on the ball of your foot instead of the heel) will do to one’s pace. SO much more spring in my step once the foot is gently absorbing the impact instead of transmitting it up to the knee. My body kept on wanting to go faster and start doing the kinds of motions you see sprinters doing.

My new shoes are, of course, blue and white, because Rita.

My legs are probably gonna ache for a bit for the next few days from this new motion, but it shouldn’t be too bad given that I’m really still easing into running as a whole. And engaging more of my body at once just makes the inner animal delighted.

it also probably didn’t hurt that I was listening to a playlist of stuff I was considering for the first Rita Kickstarter video…

Just don’t. It comes back around to bite you eventually.